It was between half-past one and two when all this happened; at five Bunty
was half-sitting, half-lying on the old, springless sofa in the nursery. Poppet had squeezed herself on the half-inch of space he had left, and was gazing at him, a look of great content and unspeakable love on her little face; and Meg on the low rocking-chair beside them was holding a hand of each.
The others had been turned out. Bunty lay with his face to the wall and his lips shut in a dogged kind of way when they had all crowded round asking questions; and at last Meg, seeing he was totally unfit for any excitement or distress, persuaded them to leave him to Poppet and herself till he was stronger.
And when the room was quiet, and Meg rocking softly to and fro, and Poppet occasionally rubbing her smooth little cheek against his old coat, he told them everything of his own accord.
He had not been to America at all, he had never even heard of a boat called the Isabella; it must have been some other boy the police had heard of, and a chance resemblance that made them connect the two.
[145]
]He had been in or near Sydney all the time, living he hardly knew how. The first month he had done odd jobs, fetched and carried for a grocer in Botany. Then he had managed to get a place on a rough farm in the Lane Cove district, where he was paid four shillings a week and given board and lodging—of a kind. But there had been a long spell of rainy weather and rough westerly winds, and he had been in wet things sometimes from morning to night.
“And it gave me fever—rheumatic—pretty badly,” he said; “so they shipped me down to the hospital here in Sydney.”
Poppet buried her nose in the sofa cushion, and Meg gave an exclamation of horror.
“And you didn’t tell the people who you were, and send for us?” she said, wondering if this could be the same boy who, when he was small, required the sympathies of the house if he scratched his knees.
“How could I?” was Bunty’s